Vlog #10 Three strategies for a stronger new year

Here are three strategies I use in my own climbing to reflect on the previous year and plan for better results in the coming year, with some examples of how to implement them. Near the end of this video, I discuss some supplementation I do while recovering from tendon/ligament injuries. The paper I reference is this one by Keith Baar and colleagues.

The difficult question of sports injuries and disillusionment in youngsters

This good website has some interesting information on the size of the problem of young sportspeople getting injured. Injury rates are going up, to uncomfortably high levels. A serious sports injury is not just a short term issue for a young climber, runner or other sportsperson. It’s one of a few important reasons why so many youngsters drop out of sport before they even finish their teens.

It’s so obviously ironic that parents and coaches both take satisfaction from encouraging kids to take part in sport to foster a lifelong habit of activity and enjoyment. Yet overdoing that encouragement is one of the main reasons behind them ultimately dropping out or getting injured. The number one reason youngsters give for deciding to quit their sport is pressure from parents, coaches or the setup of their sport. So, whatever we are doing, it’s wrong.

Lots of coaches are still wrestling with the idea of whether formal competition in sport is a good idea for kids. There doesn’t appear to be any straightforward answer to that question. The best answer might be ‘it depends’. If the environment is optimal, competition in sport may be quite healthy, if unnecessary. However, it rarely is optimal. There are potential sources of problems everywhere. Therefore, being realistic, maybe no competitive sport until beyond adolescence is better? That is definitely still an open debate.

It’s difficult for parents even to realise how pivotal their role is. For instance, who can blame parents for subconsciously rewarding competition results instead of effort, balance, maturity, sportsmanship and science based training in sport? The very best coaches in professional sport can hardly seem to achieve this, even though they should know better. It’s a tough challenge for parents to assume the role of sports philosopher, role model, coach, sports scientist and sports medic. On the other hand, if you are going to invest time, effort and expense in encouraging your child’s path in sport, you might as well do it properly, in a way that doesn’t leave them either injured or disillusioned and out of sport for good at 13 or 14.

It’s difficult for coaches too. Reliable and useful information on training program design and injury prevention is extremely hard to come by. Moreover, coaches often don’t have enough time with youngsters to provide individually tailored training. In this situation, I think it’s important that they emphasise to both parents and youngsters that the advice they give has limitations, and if they want to make sure they are training safely, they should consider  training themselves to be informed self-coaches, or hire in some more personalised coaching.

In climbing, we are about to enter a dangerous period (in the UK at least) since some new coaching qualifications are coming on-stream. Qualifications, generally speaking, are of course a good thing. However, there can be problems if parents see the word ‘qualified coach’ and don’t think any more about what the qualification means. It’s possible to be a qualified coach in many sports on surprisingly little experience, and unfortunately, depth of knowledge. Parents should be careful to make themselves aware of the level of skill and experience of those coaching their children. Start from the assumption that the coaches are not suitably experienced or resourced to prevent injuries in youngsters, and that you’ll need to consult a range of sources to ensure the best chances of avoiding injury and ensuring youngsters have a good range of influences on their development in sport.

I must say, with my own child, I’d be equivocal at best about encouraging them to get involved in regular competitive sport before adolescence. Non-competitive sport offers so many of the benefits, if not more, without the inherent problems that competition brings. Taking injury risk in particular, non-competitive sports offer the opportunity for more variety and spontaneity in the yearly diet of training, important both physically and psychologically. They also push the focus of performance inwards, to messages coming from the body, rather than outwards, just doing the same training as your peers or trying to keep up with others unrealistically. In other words, they are often healthier all round.

I see advice for youngsters in competitive sport to take breaks in the year from competition. Good advice, although not if they simply stop training completely. Complete rest falls foul of one of the fundamental laws of tendon injuries: “tendons don’t like rest or change”.

I’m talking about parents, coaches and the youngsters themselves so far. They have the immediate responsibility to improve the outcome for the youngster as they move forward with their own life. But what about those higher up, who are in charge of leading sport, spending our money to make sure the potential benefits for all of us are realised? What is the point in promoting sport if it is so hampered by a massive early dropout rate and millions (3.5 million in the US) of injured kids? The idea is that we foster lifelong involvement in sport and physical activity and that sport is something youngsters enjoy over the long term. It’s pretty clear that it doesn’t nearly meet these aims for a big chunk of the participants.

This is a big, serious question, that needs leaders of sport to go right back to basics. When we promote sport, how should it be done? What sports, or sporting practices are healthy in the long term? Should we be promoting entirely different sports and ideas around sport? Probably. I’d like to see data comparing dropout rates between competitive sports and non-competitive sports, such as those based around the outdoors and training. My hunch is that if sporting culture was less centred around rankings or winning/losing and more centred around simple fun, effort, resourcefulness and dedication, that dropout rate would go down.

What specifically should change? It’s a deep cultural change, so no single or simple thing can be targeted. I’d certainly like to see that a session at the gym/leisure centre/sports facility should always be cheaper than a can of cider. Getting an exercise high should always be cheaper than a drug high like alcohol for so many kids who have limited money. Unhealthy goods like cigarettes and alcohol are taxed more heavily to take account of their effects. Why not services? It seems a shame that new sports facilities are not given a more favourable financial climate in which to flourish. At big multi-activity centres, the pizza and cinema tickets could be £1 more expensive so that the indoor snow slope or climbing wall can be cheaper. The many threads of enjoyment of exercise and training for it’s own sake should be promoted over winning and losing. More could be made of urban spaces. Good incentives should be set up for running, cycling, parkour, skateboarding etc clubs to use these spaces. Everyday exercise and sport should be as conspicuous as possible. ‘No ball games’ signs could be banned. If the NHS is going to save money by encouraging us all to be involved in sports, at least some provision is going to be needed to offer proper sports medical care, in recognition that sports injuries do happen and are career ending if left untreated. Surely it’s cheaper to correctly diagnose and repair the ACL tear now than treat the arthritic patient in a couple of decades?

Of course there are countless possibilities along these lines. The cumulative effect would be that youngsters who we do manage to encourage into sport will have enough variety in their activity, so they don’t grow to hate their own sports before they are 15. Moreover, they’ll be less likely to feel the need to enter into serious competition until later, when they are ready. Their parents will be less likely to ‘hang’ their encouragement on success in one sport as well as measuring that success along different lines. And, the youngsters might become more physically conditioned from a longer background in sports before they launch into serious training and hence lower their risk of injury.

Young climbers I’ve met who have been involved in the competitive side of climbing are the only ones I’ve ever seen stop climbing at a young age. I don’t think I can recall ever seeing a climber who was focused on the other aspects of the sport decide to give up. That’s not to say I conclude that competition is bad. It’s just that it can tend to drown out the other reasons for doing sport and become a demotivator after a while.

Whatever is suggested as solutions, the first stage is to really recognise that the injury and dropout rates among youngsters in sport means that what we are doing now is not enough.

Less waste

Just had another email from a climber with an amazing story of determination to break personal climbing barriers at a relatively old age and following the diagnosis of a serious health condition. The thought that crossed my mind straight away was ‘why can’t we all learn to be this determined and resourceful 20 or 30 years earlier’.

Of course, in the young, there is probably a classic ‘bell curve’ of athletes, some who develop great mental toughness, determination and general steeliness against problems at an early age.

As a coach dealing with climbers in their 40s and beyond, the advice needed is often practical; do this, try that and nothing more. You know that when pointed in the right direction, these hardened athletes will go off and work their backsides off to get where they need to go. Energy is maybe a little harder to come by, but it doesn’t have to matter because almost none is wasted.

Youth has a lot of energy to throw at things, but it’s too often poorly directed. Too focused on the fun stuff, ignoring the boring but important stuff. So much of that energy is wasted. 

When there's nothing left to prove

I read a comment from a very accomplished climber the other day saying it was getting difficult to find the motivation to train, or most specifically to find a reason to keep training. This is an interesting question for older athletes who have done all they ever dreamed of doing in their sport. Why would you want to spend huge amounts of time and effort chasing tiny gains when there is so much more to life there in the background?

In competitive sports I can see why it would end up being an ‘all or nothing’ relationship with training. But in climbing it’s a lot more complicated than that. For young climbers, competition and proving yourself might well be a strong motivator. Training is essentially easy when you are in your twenties too unless you really have some badass goals and don't accept less than getting them. It mostly feels like a flowing river of improvement. All you have to do is jump in and you flow along from training to results. So there is enjoyment just from going with the flow and gaining the gains that are there for the taking. Later, it becomes more like trying to swim upstream and takes a lot more effort for less gain. So you really have to want it.

So why would you? Motivation is obviously a personal thing and everyone news to have their own mindset. For me, training for competitive reasons has long dropped off the bottom of my list of reasons to do it. There are 2 reasons why I like to train these days.

First and foremost, it’s to climb the lines I’ve seen and want to climb. So it follows that without the lines to fire the inspiration, the motivation to train dries up. So it’s quite important to live in a place where there is one line after another to try. 

Second, it’s because training itself is, or at least can be, enjoyable in itself. In recent years I’ve become more and more aware of that small changes how you train determine whether you really want to do it, or it becomes a chore. For instance, if I go for a run, I want it to be on a new mountain I’ve not explored, not a treadmill. So it kind of comes back to matching the training with my original motivation for starting climbing - to explore impressive and nice outdoor places. If I train indoors, I want it to be on nice holds, in a good temperature, with good people, and sometimes, on my own. To me, the feeling of having made a gain in training and having that sense of feeling light and strong is one of the most powerful feelings in sport. I still like it just as much despite the fact it’s more fleeting and much harder won than before.

If it wasn’t hard, it would be easy

...And we are looking for hard, aren’t we?!

On this blog I guess many of the posts are about finding and attacking weaknesses. Lots of people avoid them without realising it and hence the need to keep reiterating both the general point and the detail. But what of milking your strengths. Some strengths, like being a little stronger of finger than the next guy or being able to reach a bit further or being dynamic and confident enough to jump can only be milked so much. Not all strengths, or weaknesses are equal.

Someone recently asked me what my ‘secret’ was for climbing hard. I’m wary of oversimplifying or seeing a complex picture as black and white, but I’d say I have one strength that I’ve milked a hell of a lot, and fortunately it’s a gift that keeps on giving. I’m not good at climbing hard, but I like having a hard time. Simple as that really.

So why is that a strength? Well just think about some of the things that are ‘hard’ about climbing: Failing repeatedly and not having an immediate solution or avenue to pursue next. Nerves of anticipation. Fear. Even occasionally a little pain or self-discipline (these things are all relative). These are normally the things that make climbers outright give up an attempt or decide not to keep having attempts. Or it could be more of a subtle effect. Thee things might not make you give up, but just cause you to lift off the gas pedal slightly.

Revelling in the ‘hardness’ of hard climbing isn’t an easy mindset to adopt. What worked for me was simply to remind myself, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes directly, that if whatever I’m trying wasn’t hard, it would be easy. I’m not looking to do easy climbs easily. I want to do hard climbs easily. Every hard climb I’ve ever done has felt easy in the moment of success, but hard right up to that point. Therefore since 99% of climbing time is going to feel hard in all the forms that ‘hard’ takes, if you enjoy those things then you get on with the journey to that special moment of easiness quicker.

Some examples:

Bouldering - When holding a swing at the limit of your strength, you feel like you don’t have enough strength to absorb it and are going to come off. A lot of hard bouldering experience teaches you to ignore that feeling and keep pulling. A proportion of the time, despite your expectations, your feet will swing back and you’ll get to the top. All of this process of doubt and reaffirmation of belief happens inside a split second at the apex of the swing.

Sport climbing - Just because you tried the move for 300 times doesn’t mean you cant do it with your present level of strength. You might not have found the best way yet. Just don’t keep trying it the same way. Change something, however small, each time. Experiment systematically. You’ll learn that the available holds and ways to move through them have a lot more to offer than you could have imagined. If you do want to try it 300 times though, do your belayer a favour and learn to top rope self belay!

Trad - When you are dealing with something that is all in the mind, like confidence, recognise that you are dealing with the most complicated object in the universe. You might try to understand good and bad mental performances, but you will never be able to attribute them completely and correctly to the factors that resulted in the performance. Take what messages you can, use them and shrug off the negative or retrograde feelings with vigour. We feel amazing after a steady lead of a bold route because it is a feat that is extremely difficult to achieve. Don't be scared of mental blocks. Although they seem utterly impenetrable when you are up against one, they are ultimately just thoughts. 

Treat each climb as a worthy enemy. Expect it to lie down and it might be impossible, Expect to be tested and you’ll be ready for the test.

For climbing coaches : “In a Hurricaine…

...even Turkeys can fly”

I go on in my book and this blog a lot about influences and their importance on how well we climb. The above quote, reminded to me by a CEO talking about economics, made me nod and agree.

In a social group of climbers, like a group of friends, a climbing wall scene, a club etc there are some who are the beacons - they have so much energy and drive that it radiates onto everyone else nearby and helps them learn more, have that extra attempt, try that different foot sequence or bear down and hold that swing. If you are that person - great! All you need to do is learn to focus your energy and unleash it without inhibition at the right moments.

For everyone else, it’s a problem because without the warmth of external energy, you might not keep progressing, or may even go backwards in your climbing. The paradox is the that your challenge is to take what you can from the beacons, but also learn to be able to go under your own steam. This means understanding well what particular parts of the climbing game motivate you to do the mundane stuff, like try that problem all those different ways or complete those physio exercises, or do that training session on your own.

For coaches looking after a cohort of climbers - your task is tricky. You have to identify the beacons, channel their energy, not let them settle for just being the best in their little group.   Show them the next level of challenges before they lie back and forget how to be hungry for improvement. You also have to look for the turkeys (I’m only calling them that in ref to the above quote!) - the ones who will not keep showing up and giving it some if the beacon wasn’t there with them. Showing them how to stay patient, focused and enjoying the routine of climbing from within themselves rather than the social framework where it normally occurs is easier said than done. It’s best taken in small steps, with gentle  encouragement. 

For young wannabes playing the lottery

As a climbing coach who is always trying to understand and communicate the ingredients of becoming really good at climbing, I spend a fair bit of time observing other disciplines like art and business. An idea I read today looked at the lotteries we play as wannabes in whatever field.

Not the ‘actual’ lottery, but the lottery of getting picked by a talent scout, signed by a big record company or featured in a TV programme. Most people get to show some raw, unrefined talent as youngsters. It’s not really gone anywhere yet. It needs focus and application over years to develop before it has the power to break new ground. If you are gearing everything you do towards winning that lottery, are you accepting that you’re almost certain to be one of the ones who loses? People don’t really keep playing the national lotteries as a way to become millionaires. What keeps them buying the ticket is the buzz of buying the ticket.

A lot of the time, ‘waiting’ to win opportunity lotteries like record deals causes young talents to languish without ever going anywhere. In a flash they are no longer 18 but jaded and tired out from the fruitless wait for something they will never win. I’ve seen a lot of talents in climbing fizzle because they are ‘waiting’ to score a sponsorship deal, strike on a magic training formula, move to a climbing mecca and magically soak up the ability etc.

How would it change your approach if you bet on never winning a lucky break? If you bet on having to get there just on the resources you have right now? That’s when industriousness kicks in and some actual progress happens.

Clean and messy performance

Climbers who are into training or pushing themselves are often trying to keep everything ‘clean’. Clean in this sense means without complication - black and white, yes or no, all or nothing.

This is good, but it can backfire. It backfires because real life performance in sport (of life etc) is messy, always. Well, OK not always. If you’re a bit older, you’ll look back on a handful of moments, maybe only one, where everything was clean for a fleeting few minutes on a climb. Sometimes that’ll be during a lifetime best performance for you, but not always. Sometimes it happens on an easier climb that just went like a dream.

So the problem is that in all your mental effort and training, you’re pushing to make everything cleaner. Clean training schedule with no interruptions from work, weather or injury. Clean technique with no sloppy footwork, grunting or wobbling. Clean preparation with a good nights sleep, rested muscles, good food and good vibes before you want to climb something hard. It never happens does it? Well apart from those one or two times in your life when it does.

Obviously we can’t go around hoping for one of those once in a lifetime moments to happen right now. We need to find a way to climb well and be comfortable with our performance on a daily basis. It’s fine to try and keep everything clean and optimal. It’s the eternal game of the athlete. But accept that no matter how much you try, you dealing with something that is inherently messy (life) and you will never win. 

Climbers that do try to beat the messiness of life and sporting performance get backed into a corner. Narrowing your field of skills to keep greater control over them. Training fewer performance components so you don’t have to face losses of previous gains. Competing in smaller and smaller arenas, like one angle, board, discipline etc. In the short term it might even work and feel comforting. In the longer term, it is almost guaranteed to fail to make you a good climber and leaves you wide open to taking big hits to morale and motivation. Most of the keen climbers I’ve seen give up completely have done so for this reason.

Keep your climbing, your training, your mental preparation, your schedule as clean as life allows. But be ready to keep going when everything is a complete bloody mess.

Lessons from health promotion

Mark makes the simple but seemingly obvious point about why the health promotion sector has been roundly failing to get people to change their habits. If you don’t have time to click through the stories, the short version is that the most senior elements of the medical profession are still attempting to get people to take control of their own risk behaviours for health - smoking, drinking and getting fat - by issuing a ethical and moral appeal direct at the individual. Mark points out that it cannot work on it’s own. We are social beings and it’s too hard to act individually swim against the tide of what everyone around you is doing. 

Kids that go to boarding school end up with totally different accents from their parents - almost permanently. Go on a holiday where there isn’t a culture of sitting around, drinking, eating and not doing much (like a mountaineering trip) and you’ll probably come home a pound or two lighter, without even trying.

Some goes for your sport performance, training, whatever. The best way to get into a national team is to spend a stack of time with everyone else who is doing the same. I feel that it’s not necessary to make this a permanent move. It’s about hardwiring a new set of habits, norms, standards. It takes a bit of time to get there. But once you are there it’s possible to operate in isolation with only sporadic refreshers. In other words, beyond a certain point you can partially insulate yourself from settling for a second rate effort at being good at sport, even if you regularly train with others who do.

5 ways to sabotage your training session

If you wanted to learn how to mess up your training and stay as crap as possible at climbing, or better still injured and disillusioned with your sport, you could learn any of these five habits that you’ll see in fellow climbers all the time. Guaranteeing failure to improve at climbing is a lot easier that guaranteeing success, which is why so many people manage it with the following:

1. Wait until you are tired. Slower reactions and lazy movements will add more peak forces on working tendons and joints, giving you more microscopic tissue damage. So you can add the same damage as you would with a heavy training session, even though you burned out after a short time and gave up. Because you only measured the training load as route grades X volume, you wont notice the extra damage and fail to rest long enough. Repeat for several sessions and you have an overuse injury.

2. Listen too closely to fear. Could be fear of falling, or fear of failing. Doesn’t matter. The research shows that we are driven by fear of loss. It worked well at the time our brain architecture was being designed by evolution, a few years back when something stealing your food or worse still eating you meant it was game over. But the trait causes some big problems in modern life. Like in sport climbing when falling is safe but still feels terrifying. We are scared of the wrong things and worse still when we expose ourselves to them in the wrong way (too much too soon) we become hypersensitive to them. A crippling negative feedback cycle. Slow, incremental exposure to scary things like competitive situations, pressure to succeed when you’ve invested a lot in a goal, or even just taking a lob is the way to conquer. Try and shortcut it or skip the training and go straight for the performance and you’ll fail spectacularly.

3. Do the same as last time. Humans love routines, so this one couldn’t be easier to slip into. Successful training is about maximising the total load on the body across the different energy systems, muscle groups, techniques etc. Working on one while the other rests allows you to fit in more stimulus per unit time. If you do the same routes, on the same length of wall, same angle, hold type pattern of session intensity you’ll manage to overtrain a few systems while detraining the rest. Worst possible place to be. Ever wondered how olympic athletes absorb 10 times the number of training hours you do, but have less time out to injury?

4. Compete like it’s a competition. It rarely occurs to amateur athletes that there is a difference between competing in training and competing in competition. Mainstream sports are pretty messed up, but if there’s one thing they are good at it’s knowing where the difference lies. The (superficial) goal is competing in competition is to win the game, be the best, outdo the other guy. So you have to bend over backwards, go that extra mile, ignore pain, tiredness and not look over your shoulder, just focus on the finish line. Competing in training is about learning from the other guy. So the point is for you to watch them, not for them to watch you. But if they are watching you while you show off your skills, they can catch up faster by assimilating what you do and adding it to their individual strengths.

5. Get angry. I don’t mean simply release the tension of a big effort with a power scream - that’s fine. I mean get ANGRY! Kick the wall, tear your hair out, have a rant at the hold that moved, the heat, the grease, the duff beta you got off me and the guy who was watching and made you feel nervous. That will distract you nicely from the things that might actually make a difference.

Don’t do what they do

Remember that being a successful athlete, not matter which arena you compare yourself in (peers, amateur, professional) by definition means doing what other people wouldn’t.

Lots of people model their technique, training and tactics on what their peers are doing. But if you want to get better than them, they are exactly the wrong people to look at. 

The modelling can be conscious and deliberate, but most of the time you actually do it subconsciously. So wake up! The greatest success you can hope for by doing what everyone else (in YOUR world of peers) does is to assimilate the same level of mediocrity they have. More about all this in my book.

While we’re on the subject of role models, an important point about them. Yes they are useful, even essential to help you get more out of yourself, so long as you chose the right role models. But keep in mind it’s the approach they have that you’re copying, not the exact actions. Their life, physiology, schedule, resources etc can never fit with yours. So don’t try. So the question is “What would they do if they had this (my) circumstance right now?”.

And one other thing… Good role models in sport are ones you can actually find some details about - someone you can feel you know through seeing them, reading about them or even better, being coached by them! If it’s someone who never speaks, blogs, writes coaches, it’s pretty hard to ask the question above and get near a useful answer.

You have two choices, pick a better role model, or ask them to keep in touch more. Interview them for your blog or your favourite website and ask them all the questions you want in one go. Just an idea.

Chasing numbers versus breaking barriers

Peter commented on my last post:

“What about the fact that some (many? most?) climbers are in this game for the sheer fun of it?

It seems to me (from my bumbly-level vantage point) that chasing numbers is 99% drudgery, so many climbers naturally plateau at the point of maximum fun for least effort (however you define those two dimensions).

Tangentially, a few climbers I've known who've played the numbers game inevitably reach a performance plateau no matter how hard they work, and in a couple of cases that's been sufficiently demoralising that they've given the game away entirely.”

I started replying as a comment but thought it might be better as a whole point seeing as he raises such an important question.

Chasing numbers is 100% drudgery because numbers are meaningless. Improving at climbing is entirely different. Depending on how you go about it, it can be a source of endless and deep enjoyment and satisfaction, or it can be hellish.

It’s enjoyable and satisfying if you are oriented towards using all your skills to break the barriers and are good at measuring when you’ve broken them. It’s also enjoyable when you suddenly get an insight into how you have become stuck in your ways or limited in your ideas about how to improve. This is a constant battle (and hence enjoyment). Plateaus are not really frustrating because they are ever more challenging opportunities to play the next round of the improvement game. The early rounds, where all you have to do is show up as a young climber and your muscles get bigger are just the warm-ups. Once you hit your first plateau the game gets much more interesting and ultimately rewarding. More on this in the first chapter of my book.

It can be hellish if you think you are chasing improvement, but deep down you are really chasing numbers. You move from hollow victory to ever more hollow victory until you hit a plateau and realise at the bitter end your top number was no more satisfying than the first. That feeling would make any athlete throw in the towel.

What school can’t teach you about climbing hard

I just did some interviews about my climbing for various publications. The questions, in one way or another, ask “what is your secret”? It’s especially relevant in my case as I can’t answer that I’m naturally strong, or thin or talented or started climbing before I could walk.

I’ve given roundabout answers for years, not understanding the underlying theme myself. In parallel I’ve tried to understand why climbers I’ve coached plateau where they do with apparently all the practical ingredients to keep improving.

Recently I’ve thought and talked a lot about school and it’s effects down the line. Sad as it makes me to say it, I learned my ‘secret’ to doing what I have when I was away from school, which happened a lot.  A lot of school is about explicitly or implicitly working to fit in. To attain the satisfactory standard of your peers and nothing more. The minimum necessary to get an A and then you can coast. But good performance is by definition not fitting in. You won’t find the solution to the technique, motivation, training, financial, practical or unexplained problem that’s holding you back, by waiting for your teachers or peers or someone on a forum to tell you.

I’m not saying they are useless - they are essential for pointing you in the right direction and supplying the initial shove. After that you roll to a stop pretty quickly unless you start producing your own momentum.

Fifteen years of learning to wait to be told what to do and put in the minimum amount of work is really hard to unlearn. Start now!

Examples of climbers doing what others were not:

Jerry Moffatt’s generation were all shy about wanting to really go for it and be truly competitive. Instead, Jerry set his sights publicly on the next horizon even though his ambitiousness stood out to onlookers as brashness.

Patxi Usobiaga understood that there was room to make training for competition climbing more scientific for someone with the will to do or access the necessary learning. His competitors were too busy just showing up at the wall to be bothered with this extra effort.

Adam Ondra probably clocked up more metres of limestone climbed by the time he was five that you have in your whole climbing career. Watching him, you might mistake him for a speed climber. Could you climb as fast as that without messing up?

So if this idea helped me, how? Two examples:

A lot of climbers will try one climb for a few tries, maybe even several days of tries. I got used to this early, because I was rubbish at climbing. So used to it, I thought, why not try not just a few more times, but a lot more times. At Dumbarton rock I tried single moves hundreds of times. Not just the same way every time. I experimented by changing one aspect of the movement each time and recording the results in my mind. After 15 years of this I became probably the weakest 8c+ climber you’ll ever meet. In training I apply the same principle - at the bouldering wall I concentrate during my rests on what happened during the last attempt and what the plan is for the next. This is why I don’t get bored training on my own.

I needed to be able to understand training to be able to adapt the advice written in training books with less error. So I studied it for 6 years at university. This was the shortest way to getting the answers I needed - the shortcut! The long way round is to stumble around with trial and error and poor bits of advice forever. My good fortune was that I came to realise it was the shortcut.

If I only knew now what I knew then

I’ve written a lot on this site and recently in my Coachwise series on the MCofS site about the crippling and often hidden consequences of fear of failure on your climbing (or any skill you are trying to learn). Here is one message for young climbers, and one for adults.

There are some revealing comparisons to be made between the dynamics of fear of failure in adults and youngsters as they learn climbing. Apart from the lucky few that discover the power of focus before adulthood, focus is the main problem for young climbers. In fact most young climbers reading this post will probably have judged it too involved and switched off already. Kids at the wall try a bit of this and a bit of that, and if it takes longer than three seconds to find the correct footholds and body position they lose patience and jump for the hold and let their light bodies swing out below them. Adults look on with jeaslousy at how they hold on and keep going with such obviously poor technique. But of course they pay for such reliance on temporary lightness when they grow into heavy adult bodies and have to learn good footwork with slow learning adult brains.

So the best young climber after the first few years will end up being the one who learns to focus earliest.

But what adults gain in knowing how to discipline themselves and focus on both immediate and longer term tasks, they lose in fear of failure. They become all sensitive that strangers at the climbing wall, their mates or the coach will see them wobble, flail and fall. Without knowing they are doing it, they size up potential climbs to try based on likelihood of embarrassing themselves, rather than anything else. The result? An ever narrowing comfort zone that feels progressively more unpleasant to be outside as the feedback loop plays out over time.

Kids, on the other hand, are learning everything for the first time, they are not yet masters of anything. So failing, grappling, and trying again is all they know. As soon as adults become masters in any one field (such as their job, academic field, driving, whatever) they like that feeling and settle into it’s comfort. Sadly, this makes it much more difficult to learn other skills at the optimum rate.

The best (and happiest) adult climber is the one who learns to focus before being an adult, and doesn’t forget that failing repeatedly is normal.

Influences - It can go either way actually

In my recent coachwise articles published in Scottish Mountaineer (and online here) I’ve talked a lot about the power of influences on your training, in terms of training choices, discipline, goal setting and level of effort.

My message here in a nutshell was that if you are surrounded by the psyched, the skilled and the hard working, you are more likely to be those things too.

Just listening to a section in Evan’s podcast about business (it’s episode 28th May if you want to download it from the Bottom Line site) reminded me not only of the strength of this effect, but also a good decision of the flip side - bad influences.

Evan’s guests were discussing positivity of attitude in general. The perspectives were generally that positivity is really good as an attribute and an influence. But problems raised were firstly that positivity must be bound by realism, and secondly that disappointments from failures can be hard to cope with sometimes.

Taking the realism thing first - This is where positivity coming from both inside yourself, and from outside sources is crucial to work within the bounds of reality. The kind of positivity that you see in talented youngsters spurred on by positive influences with a bias (friends and especially parents) often get ahead of themselves and later suffer big motivational setbacks following failures.

Positive outside influences with no bias are like gold dust. These sources tend to be encouraging by example, not just by positive reinforcement of you. They also solve the second problem of learning that it’s ok to fail, again and again, that it’s part of sporting or any success, and it’s possible to shrug it off and respond in the right way.

But talking of realism, I think it’s fair enough to say that negative influences will almost always outnumber positive for most people, in most communities. Of course the battle is to  hold the negative at arms length where possible, and soak up as much of the positive as you can. But sometimes it can actually seem like an advantage to operate in relative isolation.

I have noticed, living away from a substantial city-based climbing scene for a couple of years, and absorbing most of my media through highly customizable (web based) sources, that I have more power to reach positive (if distant) influences in my climbing, while being insulated from the many negative influences out there. I think it’s been good for my climbing.

Evan’s guests talked about a major advantage for young business people was sometimes ignorance of all the hurdles ahead. There is some truth in this.

There is much to this subject - the influences we have from other people, our ability to exercise self control, our exposure and sensitivity to feedback of different kinds as we train for our sport. All are important and affect our ability to get the most out of ourselves.

Just a thought as I listed to Evan’s (excellent) podcast while painting some doors late at night...

How do I get better?! (in one email)

Averaging out at once every day, I get a very similar email, which goes roughly like this (with minor variations):

“Hi Dave, I’m a really keen climber. I’ve been climbing for (x) years and can do (x) on sport/ trad and I’m bouldering about (x). I go to the wall/crag (x) times a week and out climbing at weekends. I really want to keep improving but I seem to have hit a bit of a plateau and don’t feel I’m getting better as fast as I could. Is there anything I should be thinking about doing now to break into the next level? Thanks in advance.”

Sometimes it adds a couple of lines about what the climber habitually does to train and asks “where am I going wrong?”

It’s great to get these emails and know there are so many keen climbers out there feeling the same way as I do. I know that for every person who sends this type of email to someone they feel might have an answer for them, there are many times more people who feel like sending it but don’t for one reason or another. So I thought I should really share publicly the answer I write back, which is broadly the same each time as you’ll see why:

“Hi, Thanks for the email and good to hear you are psyched to get better at climbing. It’s not really possible for me to identify the areas you should focus on with your training without having much more information about your climbing and training habits. And even then the answers would be a lot more than I could fit into one email.

Basically you have two choices to break out of your plateau, Right now you don’t have the information to analyse your own climbing and identify the areas to work on or change. You could either shortcut the process of learning this information by hiring a coach to make a thorough assessment of your climbing and make the decisions for you, or you could learn to do it yourself. 

Learning this information is really the hard part of getting to be a better climber, doing the training is the easy part! It takes many years to learn everything you need to know to design your own program very well. It took me 6 years of full time study and many more years of soaking up every piece of information I could. I’d totally recommend doing this because you can adapt your training practice as you progress or your goals change. 

The worst situation for your improvement is to fall between two stools and take neither path. You’ll inevitably make lots of mistakes, focus on the wrong things and end up losing a lot of time not improving nearly as fast as you could given your available resources. Choose which path you want to take and go for it! Good luck.”

The first message in this is really worth re-iterating - For one climber, a mix of poor footwork, over-reliance on strength training bringing down technique, lack of variety in angle or hold type, or missed opportunity to supplement climbing training at home could be among a longer list of things needing changing. For the next climber, it might be a totally different set of problems. 

Most climbers carry around an incomplete picture of what to value and work on to get better at climbing. So they only follow the things in their picture. A good coach might fill in the rest for you very quickly. This is the shortcut. If it suits your circumstances and goals, take the shortcut! If you want to be a lifelong follower of climbing, take the hard road and learn the rest of the picture yourself, in the long run this will be a shortcut for you.

For those who take the self-coaching path, you are already ‘on it’ by reading this blog. Good one! Keep in mind that actually doing the training is the easy part. Your constant challenge is to be doing the right training at any given moment. So for every hour of training, it would really get you further if you did at least the same in learning about training (reading, watching, thinking, analysing). 

Make sure you are getting information from every channel available - things like: this blog, many other writers on this subject online, reading books on training and not just ones specific to climbing, motivation, watching good climbers, asking good climbers what they do. (Hint: Lots of very specific questions in a row will get much more than one general question like ‘How do I get better?’).

Which path are you on? Don’t fall between two stools.

PS: I am not sure if that final figure of speech is a British thing or not, but for anyone who hasn’t heard it before, please note it refers to stool as in the chair.

Common reasons for zero improvement despite seemingly getting everything right

So, you eat well, sleep well, climb three+ times a week and mix up the training venue/activity/angle/rock type etc, but you STILL don’t improve. What’s going on?!

Here are the top two reasons why this happens in climbing:

1. You aren’t trying hard enough. Yep, that’s right, you just don’t give it 100%. Most people simply don’t realise how hard they can try. Don’t believe me? It’s been proven time after time in muscular strength research. Get your average non-athlete and put them on a strength testing apparatus of your choice and tell them to generate their perceived maximum force. Add screams of encouragement – force goes up. Add some fear – force goes up. Think about it – there are lots of extreme circumstances in life that people adapt to handle, that would be unthinkable to the untrained person. Soldiers in wars can function around sights and sounds of death, whereas an untrained person would fall apart put in their shoes. A grim but real enough analogy.

Athletes are trained to know how to generate massive amounts of neural activation and send that like a lightning bolt to the muscles to squeeze out every last drop of activation. It’s no surprise the muscles are stimulated to adapt. Much time is spent in climbing coaching just trying to communicate the fact that often the strength for the moves is already there, it’s just being able to muster the level of effort to tap into it.

Think of something in life that gives you a little shudder of fear because it’s so hard for you or you know it requires so much effort. Apply that level of effort to every route you do, and you cannot fail to improve.

2. You are too heavy. Climbing hard demands a body composition that is skewed as far as possible (palatable) in the direction of light and strong. Carrying excess weight acts like a dampener on improvements made in other performance effectors.

Consider two hypothetical male climbers, one with body fat 9%, the other 25%. Otherwise they are identical. It takes both the same amount of training to achieve a 5% increase in maximum finger force output. For the 9% fat man, this is enough to destroy all of his current projects and throw him comfortably into the next grade at least. For 30% man, it might be hardly noticeable. The lesson? Be 9% man.

Start reading the rock (and never stop)

Coaching is really great fun. I don’t have experience coaching other sports but I’m guessing climbing must be pretty interesting as sports go. In climbing there are so many skills and abilities that create the performance. Meeting climbers who are at a high level you see that many of these skills are a prerequisite and don’t even need mentioning. With these climbers the challenge is to get them to stand back, and see the bad habits they have developed and to make a convincing enough case for them to see clearly the benefits on offer if they change those habits.

Coaching climbers at a less advanced level is very different. It’s strange sometimes to see different climbers all trying to climb the same problems but using totally different styles and approaches. When in groups it makes it easier to talk folks through the benefits of each approach and the effects of neglecting other parts of the chain. Always the most dramatic image for students is when someone who is obviously very much weaker than the rest (often a female climber in a group of strong young guys) makes climbing steep ground look effortless through applying momentum and lower body muscle groups. I love it when this happens because it’s something I cannot (easily) convincingly demonstrate myself. People assume that if I make a move look easy it’s because I applied more force through the handholds. So I spend a lot of time pointing out my tensed calf muscles as I move on a steep board and generate the force for the movement from my toes and my movement of my hips.

Getting down to the nitty gritty of movement is really great fun. And making breakthroughs in it is even more fun. One big thing that the climbers I coach say to me is that they worry that they will forget my explanations for how they managed a move easily that was previously impossible, so the improvement will be transient.

And that brings me to my most repeated piece of advice in coaching – look at the rock and the holds, and listen to your body as you make the moves on them. Soak up the information it gives you, even though it feels like a brain crash to start with.

At first you will have to process the bits of information consciously, chunk by chunk. Like learning a foreign language, at first you have to piece sentences together by individually recalling words and their basic meaning. Everything is clunky and takes a great deal of conscious effort. There is no sidestepping this stage – you have to go through it.

But gradually, more and more aspects of what the hold layout means in terms of movement decisions will come automatically, and you can deal more and more with understanding it at a higher level and refining the timing and execution of each part.

But the minute you get lazy and stop looking at the holds before, during and between attempts on a climb, your technique learning will slow down or even reverse. It is the conscious (at first) efforts to understand what the holds are asking you to do that makes the connections in the brain you are after.

Look > try to understand > try to climb > try to understand > look some more > and so on

This is the way for steady technique gains.

If you go for:

Try to climb > try to climb > try to climb > brain asleep > try to climb > try to climb

Not much improvement is on the horizon.

The seemingly hard way of trying to understand climbing movement from the word go, rather than hoping you might understand it someday is actually the short cut.

Five year Audit

Following on from my last post about setting up the conditions to get to work on your climbing, and enjoyment of it, here is a practical one minute step to deciding whether your training is correct. It's so brain dead obvious you might scoff. Be warned.

Write down a very brief description (or just think back) of where and how much you climbed, what type of activities this included and who with. Something like the following would be an example:

...Climbed indoors at the local climbing centre after work tuesdays and thursdays with Brian and Joe and at the weekend on Grit. At the wall I did 5+s and 6as and a little play on the boulder wall afterwards. Outside I did HVSs and the odd E1.

How many things are the same today?

The more things that are the same, the more likely it is your climbing level has not changed.

What to do? Something different of course!

This weekend try a new rock type. This weeknight try a whole session on the panel or angle you used to avoid and see how much you can master (& begin to love) it. Phone up a different climbing partner.

I know some climbers who deliberately train on the very same problems for years on end. This is not training. In the main they do this because of fear of losing the strengths they do have if they diversify their training a bit. I can tell you it won't have a negative effect - strip those problems and start again. Give your body something fresh to adapt to.

Sticking to the stuff you are comfortable with and know you can do is not training,

Don't get stuck.

Planning your training - rule 0

Freedom > success (not the other way round)

Planning your training starts with organising your time to allow time and space to improve at the skill of climbing. Don’t work now to get freedom later. It won’t happen. Find work that gives you the freedom now, and that at least gives you the chance to start now and not later (later is too late).

Understand that this is not a mythical easy option. It’s a real option and it’s the hardest option. Safe = mediocre. Finding the answer to this problem will be the hardest training ask you’ll ever do. It’s great that you have to deal with it first!

Getting through the issue of finding the right work that fits what you want to do (as opposed fitting what you want to do to your work schedule) will most likely involve some radical action and some quite scary decisions or risks. Could you tell your boss that you want to work from home because you could produce more results in half the time? (and that you going climbing more is a good thing for your productivity, not a bad thing)?

It’s easier just to stay safe and not do it.

Then you won’t have to try and wonder how you can find the job that allows you this freedom, how you can redefine your current one, or whether you want the rewards enough to muster the effort.

In no time, twenty years will have gone past. Don’t turn round and find yourself still asking the same question.